


and you behave like this

by thebeespatella



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: HIV/AIDS Crisis, M/M, Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:09:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28471434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebeespatella/pseuds/thebeespatella
Summary: It’s unfair. And Steve’s never done well with unfair.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 12
Kudos: 62
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2020





	and you behave like this

**Author's Note:**

> For FTH 2020.
> 
> This fic is set in that nebulous in-between space after The Avengers, wherein it's possible that they all moved into the Tower together for one big national security nightmare/wet dream sleepaway camp. 
> 
> Title from [a quote from Larry Kramer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYREhmZcrps) as documented in "How to Survive a Plague": "Plague! It's a fucking plague. We are in the middle of a plague ... And you behave like this! Plague! Forty million infected people is a plague! Until we get our acts together, all of us, we are as good as dead.”
> 
> This year, inevitably, my thoughts turned to plague: the who and why we let die; the expendable among us. I kept seeing this Larry Kramer quote in thinkpieces and Tweets, because we do have historical memory for this sort of mass death event; for an enemy we can't fight with guns or bombs or superheroes, who comes into our houses and steals our breath and our jobs and our friends. We have historical memory for this sort of rage, too. And why shouldn't we be angry. 
> 
> I hope the new year brings you joy and rest. Please stay as safe and as well as you can.

Steve doesn’t mean to follow him, exactly. He knows it’s wrong, and probably “super creepy” as either a) Clint or, dark horse, b) Natasha would tell him, but he—he doesn’t know why. He knows why it’s apparently creepy. He doesn’t know why he does it anyway. 

Tony leaves the Tower every week at 1400 on Tuesdays; no fanfare, no screeds about shareholders or corporate lackeys or idiots who can’t tell a router from a roomba. Just a “Catch you later, Cap”—variable nicknames—and heading downstairs to drive himself. Not even Happy comes on these trips. 

All right, so Dr. Williams had told him to be honest with himself. Also to meditate, but one was easier than the other; he was getting used to kicking himself these days, so what was one more blow—he follows him because upon the return from one of these visits, Tony had a bright magenta smear on his cheek, and after an exchange of silent hand gestures between him and Bruce, he’d just wiped it off with his palm, went, “huh”, and gone downstairs to the workshop. 

He didn’t emerge for three days. 

It’s odd because Steve thought—he knows what lipstick means, but he’d thought he and Tony had sort of a. “A Thing”—another Clint-ism—maybe Tony thought their Thing wasn’t quite as _Thingy_ as Steve did, which—Steve could just ask him, sure. So it isn’t fair to be upset when they hadn’t even talked about it. But if he’s getting lipstick on his face, isn’t that a good thing? Not for Steve, but, generally. Especially if he’s getting lipstick on his face every Tuesday. In the _afternoon_. But holing himself up in the workshop is an indicator of a bad mood; of discontent. And in discontent, Tony tends to build weapons. 

Not that Steve is keeping track. That would be super, really creepy, probably. 

He keeps it to himself, holding it in his thoughts like a cactus that brushes up against his thoughts now and then. When he drags Tony out of the workshop and half-carries him to his room, body-warm and electric; when Tony drags an oil-streaked hand on his wrist, more out of exhaustion than sensuality, and mumbles, “Stay.” Steve looks down at him, settling into the pillows, and thinks—

Well, he thinks a lot of things. But sometimes he thinks, “What do you do on Tuesdays?” 

He doesn’t wake up with Tony next to him. He wakes up to JARVIS’s cool, “Good morning, Captain Rogers,” and the weather forecast. He can’t tell if JARVIS’s tone is actually cold; he’d tried to be offhand asking about it, and Tony had said, “JARVIS judges everyone,” but Steve couldn’t tell if he was joking. 

He wanted to be able to tell, wanted to know; he wants to know, of course. Because the real sticky thing, the thing that really needles him is that he wants to know—everything about Tony. That’s the real reason he follows him; he wants to hunt for Tony’s every nook and crevice and trapdoor, he wants to find empty places and fill them with himself; he wants to find the full ones and document them exactly. 

This, at least, he knows. When everything else feels both too small and too big—like the closeness of drowning in uncharted waters—he can reach for the solidity of his Thing, if not with, than for Tony. 

Of course it had been strange. He’s mostly gotten over the strangeness of it now, but his only other experience with this kind of thing had been less—antagonistic. Notwithstanding Peggy shooting at him in the lab that one time. It had been smooth, a natural slide, a refrain of choruses he’d heard before. He hadn’t known what he was supposed to do, but he’d known what was supposed to happen. He’d been to the movies. 

But there was no model for whatever this was, this push-pull-snap-snarl, the way that wanting to shake Tony and hold him tight were very closely related emotions. (Besides, Steve only wanted to shake him a little. Just enough to rattle his teeth). 

He’d figured it out too late.

That—and the lipstick thing. They’re not unrelated. 

So: 

“Going for a run,” he announces to the living room at large the following Tuesday, at 1330. 

“Thanks for the update,” Clint says, eyes glued to the TV.

“Okay,” he says, salutes for no reason at all, and takes the elevator down. He jogs around the block a couple times, checks his watch. 1337. He’d been taking it slow, too. Maybe he’d jumped the gun. Never too early to turn up for recon, though. 

Steve sighs and looks up at the constellation of steel crowding out the daylight sky. It’s not a _mission_. He’s just following his—friend—to whatever mysterious lipstick meeting he’s going to. 

“Situation normal, Rogers,” he says to himself. The hot dog cart guy looks at him and he shrugs. He loiters around the corner from the Tower garage exit for another twenty minutes, watching other people on their phones. He hasn’t quite got ahold of what they’re doing. “Twitter,” Tony had told him. “If you’ve got a hankering for hot takes and bad opinions.”

“Why would I look for bad opinions?” Steve said. 

Tony laughed at that. “You’ve got a point there.”

Maybe he should make an account. Other people seem to be able to lose themselves there for hours. Sometimes Steve feels like he could use a little losing himself. Plus, he doesn’t know what a “hot take” is, and that could be important. He tries to sign up but both the usernames “steverogers” and “captainamerica” are taken. It suggests “steverogers29384” but that feels a little clunky to him. 

He’s so busy trying out variations on his name that he almost misses Tony’s car peeling out of the garage. He shoves his phone in his pocket and jogs after it. In Manhattan traffic, it’s easy to follow the Porsche, going down Park for a couple blocks, then a left onto East 36th. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Steve mutters to himself when Tony takes it onto the FDR drive ramp, but follows as best he can, peeling off to take the bridge into Brooklyn. He spots the car on the turn, tucks his face under the disguise of the Yankees cap, and keeps on running. They go for a while, through Red Hook and Sunset Park. It’s easier to run here when he’s fixed on a bright yellow rumbling reminder of modernity. 

When Steve’s not in the car Tony seems to drive halfway like a normal person; on other excursions Tony had warned him that “turn signals are for the weak” and “don’t forget, I technically learned to drive in Boston.” But he signals just fine and even slows down for pedestrians to jaywalk. 

Steve’s actually beginning to feel a little winded when they reach the water. They’re almost at Coney Island Beach. Long way to go for a lipstick-friend, he thinks, and then sprints the next mile to beat out the spite. Tony’s slowing down, though, so he stops at the crosswalk behind him and watches as he pulls into a public parking spot, feeds the meter, and heads into the building. “Bayside Senior Home,” says the neat sans-serif sign on the building.

He pauses to catch his breath and looks down at his phone. He’s going to be “steve_rogers69” on Twitter, apparently. The sun is hard and bright on the pavement, and suddenly he feels the stickiness of the day clinging to him under his shirt and his shorts. He takes a deep lungful of rot-brisk sea air and heads back towards home. 

&

Objectively, Twitter isn’t the worst thing about the 21st century, but in moments like these, Steve finds it hard to remember all the other things. He finds a picture of Tony on a Pride float from earlier in the year, in the summer—he’s got his arms spread triumphantly wide, draped in a rainbow feather boa that clashes terribly with the plum suit. There’s a smear of glitter on his cheek, and he’s smiling. Sure, it’s got a little bit of the PR-go-fuck-yourself smile in there, but it’s got real happiness, too, just around the corners of the eyes, if you know to look for it, and Steve knows. It’s a nice picture. He’s glad they’d captured that moment, because Steve hadn’t been there. Coulson had pulled him in for his first session with Dr. Williams.

But the comments underneath. Sure, there are the slurs and the curses, the regular rhythm of nastiness that seems to be life on the Internet these days, but the one that really burrows under Steve’s skin to live, like a writhing tick—“of course Stark only shows up when it’s fun, so performative #corporatepride.” It uncurls something vicious that makes Steve’s jaw clamp down reflexively. _Fuck you_ is really all he’s got, and he’s got to keep it inside. He breathes out when he realizes he’s clenching the phone in his fist a little too hard. 

It’s—unfair. And Steve’s never done well with unfair. 

Because he knows that Tony shows up when it’s hard—of all of them, he’s the one that shows up after the damage is done; when they’ve saved a lot of people but not all of them. He shakes hands and takes pictures and gets his hands dirty finding toys and photo albums and documents in the wreckage. 

But he can’t stop thinking about Tuesdays. It was clear that it wasn’t—it wasn’t a lipstick rendezvous, or whatever they were calling it these days. Howard and his wife had died in an accident. Maybe Tony had a living grandmother, or something—smart to keep her hidden, Steve thinks. He shouldn’t have followed him. Now two of them have the intel.

He shouldn’t go back. It would be wrong to keep violating Tony’s privacy like that.

&

“Hi,” he says to the woman in the front desk.

“What,” she smacks at her computer screen through a wad of gum. 

“I—Tony said I should—”

“Oh, _Tony_ ,” she says, and actually sits back to look at him. “Why didn’t you say so? Room 405, Miranda Simms.” 

“Thanks,” he says. They really ought to up their security, he thinks, taking the stairs two by two until he finds the pale green door with 405 on the frame. 

There’s an old woman sitting in the corner, bloodred hair unnaturally bright in the sunlight. Her hands are folded in the lap of her pink and lavishly embroidered robe, and when she turns to look at him, he sees a dark smear of kohl around her eyes, and slash of magenta lipstick painted on her mouth. 

“Hello,” he says, even as all the pieces click into place. It’d be rude to just leave. “Ma’am. I’m a—friend. Of Tony’s. Tony Stark’s friend.”

“Well, hello there, soldier.” 

“I’m—I’m Steve,” he says. 

“Oh,” she says, voice low with a laugh. “Don’t I know.”

“I keep forgetting.”

“That you saved New York City?”

“That I’m—I don’t know, that people know my face.” 

“Mhm,” she purrs. “And the rest of you, too.” 

“Hah,” he says. “Well—”

“Come in, sit down,” she says, before he can make his exit. 

He sits on the flimsy plastic stool opposite hers. It makes a creaking noise and he wills it to keep it together. “So,” he says. “How do you know Tony?”

She purses her lips at him. “You don’t know?”

“I—uh.” 

The silence unspools between them like a fishing fly before it hits the water, until she takes pity on him. “Tony was just a baby,” she says. “Couldn’t have been a day over 15. He snuck into the club I used to perform at, and then he stood outside the door and asked me for a cigarette. He’d come every week and then hang out in the back with all of us queens.” 

“Queens,” he says. 

“Well, that was before I figured it all out,” she says, and gestures at herself. “Being a queen was a way to be myself before I knew how to be myself, you know?”

“Of course,” Steve says, and works hard to keep his face neutral. Confusion does not seem to be the right emotion for this moment. 

“So he was there when it started,” she continues. “When we all started getting sick. Crystal, she was the first to go, poor thing. She got real thin and we were all jealous. But then she started getting the—you know. The cancer on her face, the spots.” 

“Oh,” he says. He’d read about it, in one of the brick files SHIELD had given him in his first weeks back. A terrible, mysterious disease. _Kaposi’s sarcoma_ floats in the blocky typeface that they seemed to think would make him more comfortable. It didn’t. It doesn’t. He’d closed the file after reading about it and laid back on his cot. There was still no cure. Millions of people were infected across the globe, the lucky ones taking a drug “cocktail”, the unlucky ones fading fast and hard, and there was still no cure. 

“He took to the streets with us,” she says. “When enough of us realized that nobody was coming to save us. Just a baby, standing and screaming and holding a sign. Came to the meetings, too. He brought food and he brought his whiteboard.”

“Whiteboard?” 

“He did research and he would show it to us every week. Different things that might help. But that’s never been his forte, as hard as he tried, poor thing.” 

“Tony’s smart,” he says, bristling and writhing in the futility of it. 

She throws back her head and laughs at him, a bright peal of a thing. “Of course he’s smart,” she says. “He’s smarter than all of us put together, hm? But you work with him. You know what he’s been best at, and that’s building things. He helped build us up, until he couldn’t.”

“What stopped him?”

“Somebody snapped a picture of him, a pap, or something. I’m sure his old man wasn’t a fan.” 

Steve can imagine it, now. Howard had never been good with being on a losing side; a fight that might be dirt-streaked and screaming and undignified. A fight with teeth-marks and nail-scrapes. He’d preferred to stay behind the safety of barricades and trenches and other people’s lives, and that’s who Steve had thought Tony was, too. 

“Well, doesn’t matter now,” Miranda says, pushing him back into the present. “He’s gone. They’re all gone now.”

He takes her hand, impulsive. “I’m so sorry.”

“You know what I’m dying of, baby?” she says. “Old age. My lungs are giving out. Knew all those cigarettes were a bad idea.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says again, because it’s true. 

“Oh, no, don’t you see?” She smiles, and lays one hand on his. Her red nails are glossy in the summer daylight. “It’s a luxury. I never thought I’d get to die of old age. I watched my sisters dying around me, each uglier than the last. The lesions; the legions. We were all dying. It was a plague. But I get to lie here, play bingo. Tony Stark comes and talks to me and paints my nails every week. It’s a luxury.” 

“It shouldn’t have to be,” Steve says, turning his hand over to press his palm against hers. “It shouldn’t have to be this way—”

“Sure enough,” she says. “Sure enough. So what’re you going to do about it?” 

&

That’s one of many thoughts sitting on his shoulders when he walks into Dr. Williams’s office two days later.

“Hello, Steve,” she says. Her office is pleasantly antiseptic, all white walls and white furniture and big bay windows, except for one massive abstract print behind her desk. He’d looked it up on his phone, later, which had been a frustrating process: “blocks of color painting” and “block of color with stripes painting” he’d asked the Google. Finally, he’d landed on it: Mark Rothko’s “No. 3/No.13.” It engulfs him in a rust wash for the brief moments he gets to look at it while she adjusts herself onto the chair opposite his couch. Even her throw pillows are white. “How are you?”

“I did something I shouldn’t have,” he blurts. 

She sits back and waits. It hadn’t been unnerving until he’d looked that up, too, that therapists wait their patients out because most people can’t bear the extended silence. The quiet had been nice until he’d known. 

“I—followed someone.” 

“Someone suspicious?” 

“No,” he says. “Not like that. It was—a friend. I wanted to know where he was going.”

“Hmm,” she says. 

“I know it was wrong. I should have—respected him more than that.” 

“Did you do it because you don’t respect him?” 

“ _No_ ,” Steve says, helpless in his defensiveness. “No, I did it because—because I wanted to know. Where he went.” 

“Hmm,” she says. He’s going to have to do better than that. 

Well, shit. There’s nothing for it, if he wants to keep her from writing “stalker” in his patient notes later—and, really, he’s tired of carrying it around, tight in his chest. Heavy, like an anchor, which can give you safe harbor, but also drags in the deep. “Because I always want to know where he is. Not in a—I don’t want to control where he goes, and I think he—I think he should be allowed to have secrets. I know it was wrong. I just wanted to—I want to be there with him.” 

“Mhmm.” 

He’s going to have to dig deeper. He looks at her looking at him from behind her glasses. She’s good at her job, unearthing the gut-deep shrapnel he thought he’d healed over. “I.” He swallows. “I was jealous. It was wrong.” 

“It was wrong to be jealous?”

“Yes. It was wrong and unfair. I have no right to be jealous, we haven’t even—I thought. Sometimes he asks me to sleep with him.” 

Despite herself, Dr. Williams’s eyebrows fly up above her glasses. 

“Not like that!” There’s a feeling he gets in this room, sometimes, like he needs to pull a window open and stick his head out like a dog in a car and breathe in the humid garbage decay of a New York City summer. Get his bearings. Of course, this SHIELD branch is well out of the city and he wouldn’t get anything but trucks galloping on the highway and damp grass. “Just I pull him away from work, sometimes, get him to sleep. He asks me to stay, sometimes.” 

“I see,” Dr. Williams says. “That seems intimate.”

“It is,” Steve says. He hasn’t been fishing recently but he has walked through the fish market, watching crabs crawl over each other, scuttles slowed by the bed of ice. He feels like that now, like she needs to get it over with and crack open his shell and put him out of his misery.

She says, “Do you think you were being unreasonable?”

“Yes,” Steve says. His shell can withstand a lot. “Absolutely.”

“Being unreasonable and being wrong are two separate things.” 

He looks past her at the painting. “It’s so hard,” he says, after some time, “to find a foothold. Everything changes so fast.” 

“Do you know why I ask you to do your best to be honest with yourself?”

Steve blinks back to her. “Because it’s the right thing to do?”

“No,” she says. “Because how we react to that information, what we do with it—that’s the only thing we can control. That’s the only stable thing in the world. You know that better than most. Our choices don’t define us but they we can use them to understand ourselves. The emotions themselves, we can’t help them. Do you see? They’re not moral indicators.”

“I’m not having a crisis,” he says. 

“I meant the jealousy. Not your…friendship.” 

“Shit.” He realizes too late that he’s said it out loud. “I have to talk to him.”

&

He doesn’t get a chance. Tony has to fly to the West Coast that weekend—“According to Pepper, I can’t ‘postpone indefinitely’, tell her she’s wrong, Steve”—and doesn’t get in til Tuesday morning, and right before he sees Miranda feels like the wrong time to tell him about meeting Miranda, so he can only sit with his guilt and try and build a cage around it, at least, until Tony storms in to kick it down.

It happens late, in the kitchen, where Steve is sitting on a bar stool and eating an apple and tasting nothing, and then Tony is standing in front of him, face graven with a rare and trembling anger.

“You followed me.” 

“I—”

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Miranda _told me_ , asshole—”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, feeling it very heavy in his bones. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Why?”

“I—” He could tell the truth. He could take a deep breath and tell Tony the truth, at long-last. Or, he could say, “I have no excuse.” 

“She—that was—you had _no right_.” 

“You’re right. I’m so sorry, Tony.” They look at each other across the chrome and steel of the kitchen. Its sleekness feels too bright now, like a well-groomed cat sitting between them, waiting for the other to blink first. “How—how is Miranda?” It’s Steve, of course. “It’s nice that you visit her.”

“Nice?”

“She said you paint her nails—“

“ _Nice?!_ ” Tony’s breathing hard with all the rage Steve had earned; it’s unraveling his seams and bursting through to the surface. “Yes, how _nice_ , I watched every single one of them wither and die and I couldn't do anything about it, all the money in the world–”

“Everyone I knew is dead.”

“But you got to wake up after it happened.”

“I never got to say goodbye.” 

“I’m not trying to play the Oppression Olympics with you, okay. Not trying to fight the Trauma Wars,” Tony says, deflating, looking as tired as Steve feels. “Can we not—can we not compare how many of our friends died, it’s bumming me out.”

“I wasn’t—it’s not a contest, Tony,” Steve says. “I was trying to tell you that I understand.” 

“But you don’t,” Tony snaps, vivid again. “They didn’t get to get married, or have kids, or hold hands on the boardwalk, not without getting punched for it, anyway, they didn’t get to _live_ , to begin with, they killed us. Our own government watched us die and did nothing about it because—because—”

“Because you were a threat,” Steve says, standing up. “I wasn’t there, but I—I know. Who you were was a threat. I knew that if I survived the war—Buck always said I couldn’t keep my mouth shut for love or money. I would’ve ended up locked up somewhere down at Fort Knox, probably.”

“Fort Knox is underwater,” Tony says. 

“So it wouldn’t have been too different.” 

Tony offers a half-smile at that but doesn’t look him in the eye. 

“You’re right,” Steve continues. “You’re right that I wasn’t there. But I—Miranda didn’t just tell me about death. She told me about how you stood up. She told me about how you took to the streets, how you made them sit up and pay attention. Even as your friends died around you—it was a plague, it was a _plague_ , and you fought for all of us.” 

“My dad was—he was furious.” 

“He was afraid,” Steve says. His fingers itch with wanting to press a hold against Tony’s arm, wanting to draw him close; not because he thinks it’ll wipe away the memory of the dead—he knows better than that, the same way he knows the warmth of the living can help soothe the ache. “You were all afraid. And you stood up anyway.”

“Wait,” Tony says, and he looks up at him then, hard and unflinching. “ _Us?_ ” 

“Sure.” Steve’s trying not to blink. Something about this moment’s important, fraught with a meaning that he can’t quite parse. He feels the gravity of it pull him closer to Tony anyway, but he can’t tell if this is more or less than the usual tilt of his world into Tony’s orbit. “I wasn’t there, but you were still fighting for—for us. For people like us.”

“You’re _queer_?”

“Oh,” Steve says. “I mean—”

“Do _not_ give me that _queer is a slur_ horseshit,” Tony says. “This is a very important moment for me, besides, don’t think I’ve been hate-criming myself for 20 years here—”

“Yes!” He realizes too late that he’d yelled it. “I—I thought you knew. I thought I’d made it—clear.” 

“Clear,” Tony says. “ _Clear_ , sure, super _clear_ , absolutely _trans-fucking-parent_ —”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, but he doesn’t know why. It often feels like he’s only having half a conversation with Tony, that there are great pieces of it breaking off, like the glaciers in the Arctic. He’d seen a documentary, pieces of ice sinking below to drift and melt into the abyss below. He’s clutching at them now. “I didn’t—I didn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable.” 

“ _Uncomfortable_ ,” and it sounds like Tony’s seething, working himself up into a full rage, “who do you think I _am_ —”

“Not because I think you’re—you went to Pride! I saw the pictures! I just—I’m sorry, I just didn’t think it was something that needed announcing, I thought I was being too obvious, and—”

“—you’re right, the tights and the spangles, clear giveaway—”

“—that I _love_ you!” Steve’s breathing hard, he notes, in a kind of distant way. He’s breathing hard, and his hands are clamped into fists, he feels a little sweaty, because he—he’d said it. He’d said the one thing, the cactus thing, that he was going to keep to himself, that was going to be his private needle, because—because he was a coward. He was a coward, and sometimes, that was all right. It had to be all right, if in the end, you were protecting other people. 

_And yourself_ , Dr. Williams’s voice says. 

It’s—it’s all right. It’s going to be all right. He’d said it, and now he could take it. Whatever the consequences were—maybe it would be strange, for a little while, but they could figure it out, and Steve could—he would get through it, just like he has been, and maybe—someday, in the far-flung future, the vice in his chest would ease and he could watch Tony smile at someone else, and it would be all right. 

“You _what?_ ”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, and frankly, he’s getting a little tired of apologizing. “I can just—keep my distance; I can take a mission, I’m sure Coulson has something—”

“Don’t you _dare_ ,” Tony says and launches himself at Steve. 

Before he can fully process what’s happening, Steve has his hands up in a defensive stance, and they’re pressed against Tony’s chest, the arc reactor glowing through his fingers, and he can’t see anything but a blur of Tony’s face—a sweep of eyelashes, the high angle of a cheekbone, and he can feel his breath when he says, “Easy, tiger. This okay?”

Say what you want about Steve, but he isn’t _that_ slow on the uptake. 

“Yes,” he says, and leans down to press their mouths together.

&

Looking at Tony sleep in the midnight glow of the arc reactor; strange charcoal-soft shadows tossed up over the bicep he’s pillowed on; the slack give of his mouth and the dark space beyond. The flutter of his eyelids in sleep—Steve’s tempted to wake him up, to nudge against his mouth and breathe in hello. It makes no sense, but he wants to rattle Tony’s jaw with a kiss, press him open for no reason at all except that he wants. He wants, he wants, and he feels it burn up through his sternum like angel’s wings; because how could this be anything less than holy. It’s not a straight shot to heaven but it is joy; to love this man in uncertainty and to pray for grace. It’s a joy to wrap him close to his chest, to fall back asleep with love still burning in his belly and Tony’s breath like a metronome against his skin. It’s a blessing. There are no curses here, in the chasm between them, measured in fingers’ breadths. He feels his heart pushing out with each clench, finally—reaching for something, even in the dark; reaching for something, instead of curling in. 

“What’re you going to do about it?” Miranda echoes in his memory.

&

“Tony,” he says. It’s a few days later and he’s cocked a hip in the doorway for a while now—it could’ve been three minutes or three hours. Tony is welding, in a mask and gloves. There’s something meditative in the shadow of sparks, the light on the glass and how every part of Tony is hidden from him but aglow.

“Hello, sailor,” Tony says. “Soldier. You know. I’m in the middle of a—thing, but—”

“We have to talk.”

“We are talking—and that sounds ominous, by the way, you have to know that sounds ominous—”

“We have to talk about what happens next. About telling people. Because—because I don’t know about you, but I’m here. I’m in it for the long haul.”

“Haha,” Tony says, but he’s not laughing, and he shuts off the flame. “Okay, you know you can’t knock me up, right? You don’t have to—”

“I want to,” Steve says, and tries to pour the truth into his voice as best he knows how. 

“What, knock me up? We can talk to Bruce—”

“ _No_ —it’s just important to me. That we tell people.”

“Why?”

“Will you look at me, please?” Steve puts his hands in his pockets in a valiant attempt not to cross his arms. He wants to hold the sigh in. He’d thought that maybe things would change—and they have, in some immeasurable way; the way he looks at Tony looking at him. It’s only been a little while but he wants to hold it in his hands, just so he knows how much it weighs. So he can know that he can carry it, and carry it well. 

Tony, predictably, only shifts his head so Steve can see his own reflection in the dark glass in the mask. 

“It’s not about that, anyway,” Tony says. 

“Then what is it about, Tony, because I meant what I said—”

“—don’t you always—”

“—and I want this, I’ve wanted this. Please.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tony says, but it seems like it’s to himself. He finally pulls off the soldering mask and tears off the gloves and scrubs a hand over his face. “Okay. Okay, let me break it down for you. I’m—I’m a scientist. At—well, not at heart, really, hah, right, because—”

“Okay,” Steve says. 

“Anyway, so I mean—science is about—it’s about optimism, right?” 

“Sure.” 

“Because sure, you could make a case for me being a pessimist—I have, in fact, called a bunch of senators _assclowns_ , but science is—it _is_ — about optimism, because—look, you don’t come into work every day, working on your nanotech or your gamma ray or documenting the mating calls of a rare Amazonian tree frog or whatever it is zoologists do, weirdos, if you don’t believe—if you don’t believe the world could be a better place. If you didn’t think you were—helping, in some way. You wouldn’t do it if it didn’t matter.”

“Okay, but Tony—”

“Ergo hoc, ergo propter bla bla bla. Ergo, optimist, right?”

“Tony, I don’t see what optimism—”

“I mean, you could still make a case, and I think people do, right. For my cynicism.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“You could never understand,” Tony says. It’s free of bitterness or bile—it’s not a weapon. There’s a feeling like lead pooling in Steve’s chest, because whatever Tony is about to say next, he believes entirely; it’s a relentless truth to him, and there is nothing Steve could say that would undo it now. “It’s not that I’m a cynic—I’m a spoiler, and, hey. It could never be said that I’ve denied myself a good time, but good things—good things are earned. And I’ve got a backlog, couple hundred miles long. However long the range for the Jericho missile was, how’s that.” 

He tries to unstick the words from his molten throat. “So you think—you don’t deserve.”

“It’s not about that. If everybody just got what they deserved the world would look a hell of a lot different. You and I wouldn’t be here. It’s about—ruining. It’s about losing. It’s—frankly, Steve. I’m tired.” He flicks his eyes over the ragged edge of metal propped up against the table and up the concrete wall. He looks everywhere else. 

“You fought.”

“No—”

“You did it anyway. You did it when there was nothing to be optimistic about. You did it when pessimism didn’t even matter, because you were already living in a worst case scenario. But standing up and being counted—standing up. It still matters, even if you get kicked.”

Tony snorts, but Steve can see the gears turning anyway. “Easy to say when most people would break their feet kicking you.”

“I’m not—I’m not impenetrable, Tony.” 

“Don’t I know it,” Tony says, brash and big, but then he catches Steve’s eye and something seems to shift. “I—I’m tired. I’m tired of the fight being there to begin with. I don’t want to be used as a weapon.” 

“You weaponized yourself,” Steve says before he can help himself. 

“So did _you_ —”

“And look what it’s brought us. Look where it’s brought us. Sometimes you have no choice.”

“No,” Tony says. “Absolutely not, there is always a choice—”

“You didn’t have to. I didn’t have to. But we chose—we felt like there was no other way. To make up for what we couldn’t do before. There might have been other ways, but the ones we chose closed those doors to us. We’re Captain America and Iron Man, and we decided to fight, and I don’t see how we can stop fighting now. Where it—where it matters. And this matters to me. That’s what I’m…I’m trying to tell you.”

Tony looks at him for a long time. “You know we might not win. Not in our lifetime. Not in the next.” 

“The point isn’t winning, and you know it,” Steve says. “I’ve been reading. I wasn’t there before. I want to be here now.”

“Is that what you learned?”

“Pride was a riot. So lets fuck ‘em up.”

“You kiss your boyfriend with that mouth,” Tony says, shifting his weight, stepping closer. It’s low and trapped in the air between them—he almost sounds nervous, but nothing can puncture the fizz of elation that sizzles in Steve’s chest at the word— _boyfriend, boyfriend_ —the adolescent soda can pop of giddiness. He has a boyfriend, and he’s going to tell the world. 

“Sure do,” Steve says. “And he kisses me back, too.”

“What a pervert.” 

“I have it on good authority,” Steve says, leaning in to press his cheek against Tony’s shoulder, “that there’s nothing wrong with him. Nothing at all.”

—

“I can’t believe,” Tony says, much later, “that you ran the whole way there. You ran to Gowanus. You ran through Gowanus.”


End file.
